My Father's Secret Life As a Cold War Spy

And a Partner in Espionage with a Top Soviet Asset

I was heartbroken to miss my father’s funeral. His death at an early age was a shock, and away on a semester abroad during college, I didn’t make it back in time. Listening to the details a few days later from my six brothers and sisters, I was struck by the description of the size of the crowd as they arrived at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, DC, that October 1980 morning. The church’s majestic nave was nearly filled.

My siblings wondered who all these people were, they told me later, most of whose faces they did not recognize. As mourners came up to offer their condolences, it began to sink in that all these people were Dad’s friends and colleagues from CIA headquarters and from his postings in Berlin, Mexico City, Rome, and New Delhi, all the places we had lived growing up. We had never guessed he had so many contacts, so many associates, that so many people might want to see him off. He had kept that side of his life secret.

Mom and Dad had been married at St. Matthew’s 29 years earlier, and only a small wedding party had been present back then. At the funeral, hundreds of people were crowding in. My father had been such an unassuming, humble person. Could all this really be for him?

The coffin was a simple one, a plain pine box with no ornamentation, and it stood in contrast to the splendor of the cathedral as the pallbearers carried it down the aisle. It had been my father’s wish: no frills, no adornment, his body to be wrapped in ordinary white linen. Pulverem pulveri: dust to dust.

My three teenage brothers carried the coffin along with five of my father’s “State Department” friends, all of whom we had known well growing up. It was only later that we found out who they were in their own secret CIA lives: David Murphy, chief of Soviet operations; Gus Hathaway, chief of the Counterintelligence Center; Ben Pepper, branch chief, Soviet Bloc counterintelligence group; Bill Friend, Western European Division, then retired; and George Walsh, Dhaka Station chief.

On the floor directly in front of the altar was a large engraved inscription inside a circle: Here Rested the Remains of President Kennedy at the Requiem Mass, November 25, 1963, Before Their Removal to Arlington Where They Lie in Expectation of a Heavenly Resurrection. The coffin was placed on top of the engraving.

George Walsh, Dad’s best friend from his Boston childhood, delivered the eulogy. “We shall remember that he was forthright and direct when he spoke,” he said, “and yet was kind and gentle. He was scornful of pretension and vanity. We shall remember that he was called upon to shoulder responsibility at an age when most are free to play, yet from childhood, with many occasions to be sad, he was nevertheless known for his enduring good cheer, his unflagging good spirits, and diligence in his many duties to family, to church, to country. Strong in conviction, firm in his faith, his faith inspired faith in others.”

Sitting in the front pews of the cathedral listening to George speak, in their daze of bewildered grief, my brothers and sisters were unaware that something strange was happening behind them. Years later, colleagues of Dad’s told me that two men had appeared with cameras at the side door of the church and started snapping pictures. Someone rushed over and hustled them out. Then, during the Communion, a disturbance took place near one of the confessional booths. Another of Dad’s colleagues told me that she and a CIA workmate noticed a slight movement of the curtain in the booth. When her companion opened the door, he found a man with a telescopic lens peeking through the latticework; he grabbed the man’s arm and marched him out the back of the church.

The picture takers, we later found out, were working with Philip Agee. Agee was a former CIA officer who’d become disgruntled with the CIA, left the Agency, and published a book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which had blown my father’s cover, as it had those of hundreds of other officers. After the book’s publication, Agee fled to Cuba and founded a magazine, CovertAction Quarterly, infamous for its Naming Names column, dedicated to further exposing undercover CIA personnel. Such a large collection of high-level CIA people at my father’s funeral was too rich a target to ignore, so Agee’s men were identifying as many as they could, a windfall for their KGB sponsor.

We didn’t know any of this back then. It would be years before the curtain came up enough for us to understand.

*
We were pretty sure Mom knew some of Dad’s secrets, but throughout their lives together she was as silent about them as he was. Occasionally, after he died, she would tell us a few things, but she was never comfortable talking about it, and took most of what she knew to the grave with her when she died in 1997, 17 years after my father.

We weren’t completely naïve. We had known definitively that Dad was with the CIA ever since the tell-all book Inside the Company identified him five years before his death. But we had all been busy with our lives, and hadn’t pursued finding out more about it then. Besides, over our childhood years, moving from country to country, we had become conditioned to accept things as they were explained to us. And why not? There was something wonderful and reassuring about my father. He was calm, warm, trustworthy, and confident, and gave off a sense of steadiness. Even his name was solid: Paul Leo Dillon. We were content with our lives, a happy family moving around the world on Dad’s assignments over the years.

In 1997, I was 40 and well into a career with Condé Nast Publishing in New York City. My brothers and sisters had their own families and careers, and after we buried our mother with Dad at the Culpeper National Cemetery in Virginia, we started clearing out the house in Vienna, Virginia, where we had lived between Dad’s overseas assignments.

There, up in the attic, we found cardboard boxes full of letters and memorabilia that spanned the entire course of our family’s life, over decades and continents. And what we found was astonishing. My husband, James, started to look through one of the boxes and pulled out a magazine. “Hey, guys,” he said to my brothers, “did your dad have any fancy shotguns in the house when you were in India?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Jacob, the youngest in the family. “He had a few. Very fancy ones.”

“Do you know if he ever went hunting or fishing on the Yamuna River?”

“Yes,” said Paul, the middle boy. “He let me go with him once. It was funny because he hadn’t had an interest in hunting or fishing before India. Why do you ask?”

“Look at this,” said James. “Your dad’s name is in here. He handled this Soviet general.”

My interest was now piqued, too. “James, let me see that.” James had found an issue of George magazine, the “Spy Issue.”

Inside was a photo of a middle-aged man at a party of some sort— the women were wearing festive tiaras, and the man was smiling broadly and sporting a white top hat. I started to read:

His code name: TOPHAT. His mission: to use his position as a Soviet intelligence officer to spy on the Russians for the United States . . . [He] served this country for 18 years as the CIA’s highest-ranking Soviet agent. Then he was betrayed.

I read on:

TOPHAT was sent as a military attaché to India, where Paul L. Dillon, an ex-marine from Boston, was dispatched to serve as his CIA case officer.

Dillon, the article said, was “an unsung hero of the Cold War.” My father? An unsung hero of the Cold War? I continued reading:

In the Pantheon of super-agents, TOPHAT occupies a special place.

I set the magazine down and sat back, my mind a little blown. This clandestine life that my siblings and I knew so little about was suddenly taking form, my father’s hidden career becoming visible. The boxes revealed other items my mother had collected over the years: magazine and newspaper articles, letters, pictures. It seemed as if she’d left it all behind for us to find. When she was alive she wasn’t going to reveal much, but she wanted us to know all the same.

So, my father had been intimately involved with the longest-running, highest-ranking Soviet asset in the history of the Cold War. This was incredible news to take in. But who was this general, this top Soviet spy? What was the nature of his relationship with my father? What political impact did their collaboration have? I wondered, too, what kind of life the Russian general had led. Did he have children our age? What was it like for them to grow up in the Soviet Union with a spy for a father? And what was the betrayal the magazine spoke of?

Discovering my father’s partnership with a Russian spy opened a door for me. The early loss of my father had left a void that I hadn’t fully processed. My siblings and I didn’t speak to each other about it much—we preferred to bring to mind the joyful memories of him in our young years rather than dwell on the regret of his absence in our adult lives. But enough time had passed, and this new evidence of my father’s past gave me an opportunity to dispel that regret by learning more about my father’s secret life, and the life of this top Soviet asset who had been his partner in espionage.

*

More than 1,500 people worked in the embassy complex in New Delhi, 1,000 Indians and 500 Americans. On the embassy roster, Dad was first secretary, ostensibly an economics expert. On the CIA roster, he was head of the Soviet branch and chief of operations. In fact, he was in India for one job only: to handle Dmitri Polyakov.

Dad met with the CIA station chief once a week, and took part in high-level meetings inside the “bubble,” the Plexiglas-enclosed room-within-a-room that was proofed against electronic eavesdropping and guaranteed total security. Yet even within the station he was very much under cover. “Paul’s case was extraordinary,” explained Richard Allocca, a CIA officer who served with my father in New Delhi, “because he was handling an existing source, and only that source. That meant he was not circulating, he was not looking to develop assets. He was keeping his head down so as not to attract attention.”

“I knew it was very discreet,” said Terry Douglas, another Delhi colleague. “It wasn’t something that you’d ask questions about. Nobody reported to him, and he didn’t report to anyone but the chief of station, but even there it was only in name, because he was not part of general operations. He was a senior guy buried in the economic section, on special assignment.”

Shortly after we arrived in New Delhi, the American military attaché, Col. William King, spoke with his Soviet counterpart, Dmitri Polyakov, at a diplomatic reception. In a moment away from others, King told Polyakov that Paul Dillon had just come in as first secretary to work with him. Not long afterward, King invited Polyakov to his house, where Dad was waiting for him. In that first meeting at Colonel King’s house, Polyakov needed to get something off his chest: he was still fuming over the Agency’s clumsy and dangerous personal contact ploy at the reception he’d been forced to attend at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. “Don’t ever do that again!” Polyakov told Dad, intending the message for Langley headquarters.

Polyakov was impressed with my father. “He carried himself confidently . . . and there was nothing contrived about him,” he later reported. My father and Polyakov began a relationship that was warm and productive. Something clicked between the two of them, and the volume of intelligence that started flowing back to Langley demonstrated the effectiveness of the new partnership. At her desk 8,000 miles away, Sandy Grimes sensed the change. “Paul D[illon] and Polyakov were the perfect match,” she wrote in Circle of Treason. “The GRU general came to understand that he had a trustworthy co-conspirator in Paul and it was time to discard his belief that he was merely an agent whose only value was the information he provided.”

Grimes knew Dad felt the same protectiveness toward Polyakov that she did. By appointing him to handle Polyakov, the Agency had now put Angleton’s suspicions in the past and could accept the Russian for the trustworthy and reliable agent of inestimable value he had always been.

Grimes thought she could feel Polyakov’s relief. His new partner was relaxed and unpretentious, serious but not forbidding, and approached the job at hand with plainspoken intelligence. He had none of the suspicion and wariness of his previous Black Hat handlers. In working with Dad, she thought, Polyakov had found “sanctuary.” “The CIA,” she concluded, “had finally gotten it right.”

Grimes later wrote that with Polyakov’s promotion to general and his trusting relationship with my father, his time in India “was the pinnacle of our long and productive association.” The intelligence he provided was astonishing in its importance and detail, and came, she said, from the fact that Polyakov, by dint of his rank, his years of service, and his war heroism, was now a member of the GRU’s elite inner circle. As such, he had access to the highest level of Soviet war planning, strategy, and military philosophy. He knew the specifics of worldwide GRU operations. He knew the identities of GRU agents and their modi operandi. As a senior party activist, he was trusted with secret Ministry of Foreign Affairs materials and party directives. He was a member of the “old boy” network, noted Grimes, “which gave him access to state secrets that he otherwise would have been denied solely by his rank and position title.”

To facilitate their meetings and to make Polyakov look good, the CIA developed a useful ruse: offering my father up as a fake developmental contact. Polyakov reported to Moscow that he was attempting to engage an American embassy official, the first secretary in the economics section, whom he’d met at a number of diplomatic functions. They both enjoyed hunting and fishing, activities that would give Polyakov the privacy and leisure to develop this asset for undercover work. Back at the Aquarium, the GRU chiefs were encouraged, and sanctioned the relationship, giving their new potential American contact a code name: PLAID.

Polyakov’s meetings with my father now had official Soviet approval. This meant they could meet relatively out in the open. KGB minders would be informed that Moscow Center knew about and had approved of Polyakov’s meetings with the American Paul Dillon. Dad and Polyakov thereafter had regular meetings at two favored hotels, the Oberoi and the Ashok, and they saw each other at the frequent receptions hosted by different countries’ embassies. They also went on fishing and hunting trips together.

Polyakov had lied to his superiors; Dad was neither a fisherman nor a hunter, but he knew how to play a role. Soon, we noticed fancy shotguns arriving at the house, and Dad joined a local fishing and hunting club (even getting himself elected vice president). My father and Polyakov fished the upper reaches of the Yamuna River, where the water from the Himalayas was still pure, my father tape-recording Polyakov’s information while they cast their lines. In that rugged wilderness, it would have been difficult for someone to watch them undetected, but if this were possible, all anyone would have seen was two anglers enjoying their sport. On one of their outings, Dad gave Polyakov a combination gift/concealment device: a spinner for his fishing rod that had been reconstructed to function as a chamber for hiding clandestine information.

They hunted, too—an expert outdoorsman, Polyakov was as good with a rifle or shotgun as he was with a fishing rod. The remote and wild forests and riverbanks of India must have been tonic to him, a sanctuary from the dangers of his double life. Dad likely never fired a shot—on those expeditions his quarry was information, not animals.

Eva Dillon spent 25 years in the magazine publishing business in New York City, including stints at Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, The New Yorker, and as president of Reader’s Digest, U.S. Dillon and her six siblings grew up moving around the world for her father's CIA assignments in Berlin, Mexico City, Rome, and New Delhi. She holds a bachelor’s in Music from Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Charleston, South Carolina.